


regression analysis

by inverse



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-21
Updated: 2012-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-17 00:53:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/545722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inverse/pseuds/inverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a girl and her data. momoi gen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	regression analysis

1.

Right before their very first year in high school, after they graduated from Teikou, Momoi carried out some theoretical, situational calculations of her own, the results of none of which were conclusive. They mostly had to do with how the paths of growth of each regular from the Generation of Miracles would have differed, taking into consideration different factors – the role of each high school’s training programme in exploiting and increasing potential, how a player would complement another’s strengths and weaknesses should they have gone to the same school, whether the contrasting attitudes and personalities of players would have affected the evolution of style of play, and so on.

It would have taken years to compile the data if she included each and every permutation she could think of, so she laid down some ground rules for her research. Firstly, only the six high schools that the members were going to were included. Secondly, she only compared a maximum of two players at any given time in the context of any one of the six high schools.

She had to admit that some motivation for the entire project came from a conversation she had with Kuroko during their last week together in Teikou. By then Kuroko had long left the basketball team and disappeared into obscurity, to the point where literally no one chanced upon him for weeks, and a scant few in the club actually remembered that he existed. So when she spotted him walking down a corridor ahead of her one afternoon, she felt that it couldn’t have been mere coincidence. She gave chase.

“Tetsu-kun,” she asked, after he reluctantly told her where he was headed after graduation, “why didn’t you think of joining one of the members?”

“I think some of them,” she added, “would have liked to continue playing basketball with you.”

He regarded her silently, as if it was obvious why he wanted to leave.

“It’s probably for the best,” he said finally, looking at her with quiet conviction.

Momoi didn’t want to believe it, but that was a separate issue from whether what he said was true or not, and as it were, the evidence (if any) would probably lean in his favour. Nonetheless, Momoi wanted to try to prove him wrong.

 

2.

Methodology was one of Momoi’s strong suits, but that didn’t necessarily mean that she enjoyed it. Three whole days were spent purely on background research, which included consolidating information on each of the six members, compiling data of the six high schools to be considered, and even checking up on the regulars from those schools. It wasn’t necessary that she charted the stages of growth for these players, but to make things easier for herself later on, she ran a fairly simple study anyway. Finally, as a control, she charted the hypothetical progress of each of the six members for the next three years, based on existing conditions in Teikou.

Aomine and Kuroko’s partnership was what Momoi had in mind when she told Kuroko that some of the members would have liked to continue playing basketball with him. The death knell might have long been sounded, especially given Aomine’s lackadaisical attitude towards the game these days, but what Momoi really wanted to know was, disregarding that, whether it would have been beneficial for the partnership to have continued.

What she found out was both disappointing and what she had expected in the first place – that the paths of growth of both Aomine and Kuroko were independent of each other’s. It wouldn’t have mattered a bit if they continued playing together or not. In fact, what talent Kuroko had lay in such a niche that it was going to take more than simply learning from other gifted players to encourage any progress, and that was over and above what Aomine was probably willing to offer. Substituting other members for Aomine in this particular scenario produced similar results. It made Momoi wonder if there was something wrong with the criteria she used, or if she was measuring Kuroko with a faulty yardstick.

In the case of Aomine himself, the issue wasn’t really about generating growth, but rather about how fast that growth took place. In each and every scenario that Momoi put him through, he more or less reached an equivalent endpoint at the end of a projected three years of high school, and it was almost guaranteed that he’d reach his full potential sometime before that and stay there. Members like Kise and Midorima, who tended to be more aggressive (at least when it came to basketball, anyway), merely accelerated the process in short, sudden bursts. With Kise, in particular, this process tended to be a mutual one.

It went without saying that although Kise was currently the weakest member out of the Generation of Miracles (discounting Kuroko, who was in his own separate category), Momoi knew that he also started off without any experience in basketball at all, and given the rate with which he had been progressing for the past year and a half, the payoff at the end of his high school career was probably exponentially greater. Nonetheless, she noticed something curious – in half of the situations in which he was assigned to the same school as Aomine (Touou, Rakuzan and Kaijou), his progress was pegged to Aomine’s own ability. It was almost as if Aomine himself became the proverbial ceiling for growth. Another particular combination stood out to her because of its status as an outlier: Kise attained his highest level of overall skill in any calculation when assigned to Rakuzan with Midorima.

Interestingly, Midorima showed the least variance in levels of growth regardless of the member he was paired up with and regardless of the school Momoi placed him in, and Murasakibara, under the same conditions, seemed to have little effect on his teammate’s levels of growth compared to the other members. In short, Midorima was the least responsive to the other members’ influence, and Murasakibara exerted the least influence. If Momoi was to draw a tenuous link between these observations, it was that the two of them, while extremely strong on their own merits, were perhaps better off mixing with new blood. She felt that Murasakibara complemented other players who were less independent and needed more support, whereas Midorima, who developed the most independently out of the six members, would definitely benefit a lot more from being in a new environment. What kind of environment was suitable, of course, she did not precisely know, but it was food for thought.

Try as she might, however, Akashi was devilishly hard to pin down. It didn’t come as a surprise to her, because she always had the most trouble trying to extract his data throughout her three years as Teikou’s manager. The others had raw talent, but there was something uncannily different about Akashi. Sometimes she felt as if any and all skill he had in basketball besides the basics stemmed from his exceptional insight and power of judgment, and that really had nothing to do with basketball at all. As such, and as with what she had experienced in real life, the scenarios centred on Akashi, regardless of the kind of situation she placed him in, turned up no immediately discernable pattern, nor was there any kind of correlation between all the results she had gathered and any of the other factors she tried to vary. Basically, all she had were lines of data that, when put together, were just like random points on a plot which she could not graph.

 

3.

For some selfish reason known only to herself, Momoi conducted one last set of thought experiments. Despite the level of difficulty involved, she managed to churn out six sets of data, wherein all six members went to the same high school, the variable factor being the high school that they enrolled in. Surprisingly, the results were fairly similar across the board – regardless of the training regime provided or the level of skill each school’s basketball team was known for, absent all extraneous factors, there was little to no great difference in the eventual abilities of the members in their third year of high school compared to the projected growth in ability under conditions in Teikou, which was the basis for the control experiment.

In other words, all six scenarios led Momoi to the understanding that, had they all gone to the same school and continued playing in the same team, they would all have improved on the overall, yes, but only as current conditions would allow for it. There was a difference between growing to reach your potential and raising that ceiling for potential. Here, unlike in some of the other simulations, where some of the members showed markedly greater levels of improvement, there was no such raising of that ceiling. To illustrate: as expected, Kise consistently showed the most growth in all six scenarios, but this growth was nothing compared to what he would potentially experience in other scenarios in which he was the only member, or one of two members, to enrol in a certain high school. Of course this didn’t mean that Kise ended up – within the parameters of these calculations, anyway – the strongest member; improving the most was not the same as becoming the best. That spot went, predictably and by a considerable margin, as in all other situations, to Aomine. Akashi hit a plateau by his second year in four out of six cases – a strangely consistent and thought-provoking result, considering the typically random nature of any data related to him. And of the six members, Kuroko’s relative growth was the most minimal. In the scenario where all members were placed in Touou, his stats even deteriorated.

Momoi’s calculations are derived from three things: logic, mathematics, and common sense. None of them could account for why this last set of experiments turned out this way as a whole, but she could hazard a guess as to why.

There was another factor Momoi did not consider in all of her calculations, which were already subject to a small but considerable margin of error. She could not predict the presence of any other persons or events yet unknown to her, but which could very well be a complete game-changer. She did not want to rule out the possibility that something could reframe, or even rewrite, the rules that she was currently working with – could set things into an unstoppable motion – but neither was she a clairvoyant who could see into the future. All she had at the moment was a bell jar in which this vacuum of an experiment took place. So she flipped to the front of the notebook in which she’d written everything down and added the following disclaimer, as if doing so was predictive of anything: “Projections modelled under current fixed conditions and are subject to change.”

After she’d written that, ending what was possibly a week spent almost entirely with stacks of blank paper and a graphing calculator, Momoi tucked the notebook into a drawer under her desk. Then she took a shower and got dressed for bed. As she lay in bed later, flipping through the pages of a magazine, the image of Kuroko saying that it was for the best kept appearing in her mind, the expression on his face oddly pensive yet clear of doubt. That look on his face was what she recalled the most strongly. She thought about what he said to her, and now that she thought about it, she didn’t really end up with anything new that she didn’t already think she knew.


End file.
